Chapter 3 #3
I frowned, even though she couldn’t see the expression through either my fingers or my mask. “I had a sandwich at lunch.”
“What kind?”
I didn’t see why that mattered. “Peanut butter and jelly.”
“Just one?”
“Yes?” I didn’t understand why that mattered, either.
“You need a lot more calories than that if you’re going to be pushing your magic,” she said sternly. “A lot more. You like fries?”
I nodded. I did like fries. And I could usually dump them out and not have to handle the packaging too much—although most of the time, fast food fries had been put into their containers by people wearing gloves.
“Milkshake?”
I liked milkshakes, but I didn’t like touching the cup—those were much more likely to have been handled by people with bare hands. “No, thank you.”
“The boys will bring some fries,” she said. “Now, tell me what you learned.”
Once Hart had delivered a couple bags of Five Guys fries and I’d eaten a bunch of them, Cass made me touch the stone again, this time trying to find specific information.
How old she’d been when she’d asked out Sharon Wright.
At least one piece of actual information from one of the textbooks.
A description of someone else who had been getting certified with her from her class at the FBI academy.
And one totally new thing that I hadn’t felt before.
None of which I’d been able to do over the next four hours before I begged to be allowed to stop, feeling dizzy, nauseous, and like my brain was going to liquefy and melt out of my ears.
She put the stone in a baggie and handed it to me. “Keep practicing with it,” she told me.
“But it’s yours.”
She smiled. “You can give it back to me when you answer all my questions.”
I sat on my couch, glaring at the baggie with its worry stone.
I didn’t want to touch the damn thing again.
Nothing that Cass had experienced with it had been particularly gruesome or traumatizing—at least not to me, although obviously her teenage self had been mortified about being rejected—and I liked Cass, at least based on our brief interactions, so it wasn’t that it was particularly awful touching it, but I didn’t like being in someone else’s head.
And I really didn’t like the implication that if I got good at this, I might be spending more time in other people’s heads more often.
I knew that this ability could be useful to detectives or the FBI as they investigated crimes, and that was a good thing for truth and justice.
It wasn’t that I didn’t want to help, but I also knew that if I could help, they’d keep coming back to me, and then I’d be stuck doing this, the same way that Ward was stuck talking to murder victims or Mason was stuck consulting about spells and sigils.
They’d made a career out of those skills. A business.
And that made me feel guilty, because I felt like I should help, since this was a skill that I could potentially use not only to assist with criminal cases, but at Beyond the Veil to give information about family heirlooms or archaeological artifacts.
It would be useful, and it could help the business, and it might make me feel less like a hanger-on or pity case.
But it would mean that I would be spending a lot more time in other people’s heads.
Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad if I didn’t already mind spending so much time in my own head.
It was easy enough to avoid my own thoughts when I was working—filling out spreadsheets, running payroll, scheduling clients, organizing and filing paperwork.
It wasn’t particularly exciting work, but it did keep me occupied.
And when I was home, I usually filled the silence of my tiny apartment with the sounds of TV shows, movies, and some of the single-player videogames that Jackson, Mason’s nephew, recommended with complex stories.
I also liked audiobooks—the voices of narrators whose words displaced the empty space inside my head.
Reading text was harder for me, because it was too easy to get sidetracked by my own thoughts.
But when someone else was speaking, I could focus on the words, imagine what they described.
Because when I let myself think too hard, I ended up thinking about what I should be doing and wasn’t.
Usually it was something like laundry or cleaning or doing the mindfulness exercises that they’d given me at St. Cyprian’s, but that I hated doing.
Tonight, it was the fact that I should be trying to practice my psychic reading of objects and I really, really didn’t want to.
I was tired, I was sick of being in Cass’s head, and I also felt bad that I couldn’t be more useful to Hart and Raj.
I desperately wanted both things—to stop being psychic, to stop spending time in other people’s minds, but at the same time, to make myself into someone who was as valuable to Beyond the Veil, to the police, and to the FBI as Ward or Mason.
I wanted to be able to help Hart and Raj. To impress them.
There was only one way I was going to be able to do that.
With a sigh, I reached out and opened up the baggie.